Dear Colleagues:
We hope you are all weathering the challenges of COVID-19 well. We know this is an unprecedented time and wanted to express our appreciation for your work and the difficulties this brings to all of us. As helpers, it is imperative that you maintain your health and the ability to provide care to those who need it. We strongly encourage you to read and follow the recommendations for risk mitigation from the CDC and WHO.
To help you manage ongoing care, we want to provide you with the link to the guidelines EMDRIA has established for delivering EMDR therapy virtually. You can read the report of the Board Task Force, which includes the guidelines at the end of the report, by clicking HERE.. We hope that needed clinical care can be disrupted as little as possible.
We know that there are questions about EMDRIA’s conference, scheduled for August of this year. At this time, many organizations who had meetings scheduled for March and April are re-scheduling them for July and August. We believe, based on information available to us today, that August will be outside the critical window of concern, but we are continuing to monitor the situation. We will be opening our registration in approximately four weeks, and at that time will provide more information about plans, policies, etc., that will manage the conference. Our Board will be listening to public health experts and considering many factors, primary among them the health and safety of our members. We know that may require flexibility in registration, refund, and other policies and processes, and we will provide our plan and decision points when we open registration.
Since October 2018, EMDRIA has been working on a major technology change scheduled for a rolling migration over the next three weeks. This migration includes our Association Management System (our member database), our web page, and our therapist directory to a new platform. We had already anticipated being functionally “closed” in terms of outside contact and communication as we turned off our old systems, booted up our new systems, and then had some extensive further training for staff and testing of the system. This schedule is critical to maintain as closely as possible because of contractual issues that make it hard to delay.
While the staff is engaged in this migration process, we are also implementing contingency planning in response to public health recommendations for COVID-19, including work at home options. We ask for your patience should we not be quite as responsive as you have grown accustomed to us being. As you need to contact us, it will be more efficient to email us at info@emdria.org rather than call into our office with questions and needs, as our voicemail system is not the most robust for managing remote access to voicemails.
Again, we wish everyone safety and health. We are all taking extraordinary steps and care, not only for ourselves, but for one another and for the health of our communities. Please let us know (via email!) if there are any resources, we can provide to help you manage your clinical needs, and we will do our best to respond.
Namaste,
Michael